Parential Leave Rights

Last week the London Blogger's Meetup was sponsored by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, they wanted to open up new ways to engage with people, be it blogs or twitter or forums or whatever.

My take on it was if they want to listen to what I have to say to them, my message would be a very clear "Please cease to exist, please stop using tax-payer's money".

Days later I read in t'Guardian that many of their directors were resigning cos they didn't like the direction the organisation was going. Cool, maybe somehow they had heard my message.

Alas, the commission is still in operation and I read more of their doings in the Guardian this morning.

Concluding that it was time that "policy-making enabled men to play an equal part in parenting", the EHRC proposes that the first 26 weeks of a baby's life would remain dedicated maternity leave for mothers, but with higher rates of pay, so that they would receive 90% of pay for the entirety of their maternity leave. Fathers would still get two weeks of paternity leave at the birth of their child, but this would also go up to 90% of their pay.

Beyond the first six months of maternity leave, the commission proposes three blocks of "parental leave", which could be taken any time before the child's fifth birthday, each of about four months, one block dedicated to mothers, one to fathers and one either could take.

The first eight weeks of each of these blocks of leave would be paid at 90%.

Danger!!

We already have Government Advisor Sir Alan Sugar saying that

... he would be less likely to hire a woman of child-bearing age. Explaining that the law was "counterproductive", he said: "If someone comes into an interview and you think to yourself 'there is a possibility that this woman might have a child and therefore take time off' it is a bit of a psychological negative thought."

So it follows that if the parential leave rules extended equally to men, then men of child-rearing age would similarly be at a disadvantage.

Raedwald has it

One of the other consequences will be that employers will tend to employ men and women beyond their childbearing years, or those who can be classed as confirmed bachelors or spinsters. Half a percent of GDP may be peanuts in this age of fiscal profligacy, but the costs of parental leave to a small enterprise can often be crippling. The public sector will take the proposals up willingly, but with the longer term consequence that single men will earn more and occupy higher positions than married men.

In other words, the changes are likely to improve overall the employment conditions of every group other than young would-be parents.

If I ran a company, a small manufacturing organisation perhaps, where you could easily track that one person working one day produces for the company just enough wealth to pay to employ themself and cover overheads, following the direction of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, that one person working is going to have to generate enough wealth for the company to pay for more staff who aren't working.

Hmm, is this going to drive down wages?

Say a worker for a company generates wealth for the company equivalent to twice his wage, so he gets paid, the boss/admin function gets paid and the overheads and material costs and tax and all that, and the woman currently on maternity leave.

If the company now has to pay for a bloke on maternity leave too, a bloke who previously was a good worker, but is now not generating wealth for the company but still getting paid, then the remaining working chaps are going to have to cover for him and generate wealth for the company equivalent to two and a half or three times their wage, just so the company stays in business.

We can't afford to employ more people, so there's only two ways it can go, the workers who are still working have to increase their productivity by a huge chunk and keep the same wage, or get a wage cut and maintain the same productivity.

Neither of these options are particularly easy to implement, aye we're always striving to improve productivity using engineering skill and technological innovation, that's standard practice, so the only thing we can do different is cutting wages or not increasing them for a few years and keeping them low.

Sorry reader, I'm not in a very productive industry, my guys only generate a few times their own wages in wealth. We can't put up prices or we go out of business, we can't afford to employ more people cos they're going to get pregnant anyway.

Equalities and Human Rights Commission, tell me how I am supposed to afford to pay staff 90% pay when they are not generating any wealth for the company?

Losing on the job front

The more I read of PR for Dummies the ess I think that it is the career for me. Stnding in a room full of PR folk does not make one a PR person. I just don't get it, it makes me feel dirty.

Sure I appreciate its place and use in the world, but I'm just mentally on the wrong side of the equation. I can't quantify being able to do it.

Its like when Linn ran us all through the Briggs-Myer personality test, and for each type I couldn't decide which I was cos I could only think of examples of both.

On the PR front, I had a spectacularly successful website feted all over the world with thousands of unique hits a day, but have only been able to sell one copy of the tie-in book. I am in capable of selling stuff.

And with the mighty Joneses, I'm incapable of making the stuff I've actually sold. Its like some kind of mental block. You know that Vom Vorton song about leaving things until the last minute, apart from I leave things until about three months late.

I can't fulfill the PR role of getting other people to talk about things, I can only talk about stuff unto myself, usually in darkened rooms to a circle of three people. I'm just not that sticky when it comes to being a communicator. Its a personality trait, a flaw even, that's lost me so many people I was once so close to.

This is me, and its not good enough.

No response from Yellow Cat Recruitment
Not enough experience or language for We Are Social
No useful qualifications for JobCentrePlus

tra

Back on drawing Ill Theatre strips now. It was a flawed attempt at drawing my life as a webcomic/graphic novel. Sadly I lost the will do do it a few months back, but my mojo is back.

New strips from here.

There's wee older / newer posts links near the bottom of each page. Oh, if I could use Blogger to make them bigger buttons, with arrows on them, life would be about two buttons better. Think of the wonderful and joyous webcomicy things you could find more easily and intuitively.

Interesting adventures and storylines in the past include:-

Half-arsed Time Travel - Some kind of Life on Mars vibe and stabs
Climbing into the internet - Imagineering and rejoining bits of the internet
Back on Bowlie - Trying to deal with my bad rep

Roundup #167 - Bowlie Final Countdown photies

In lieu of Bowlie, this is a round up of all the photies across the internets from the Final Countdown Weekend. That'll be Friday night's quiz thing, the gig at Jamm on Saturday and the picnic on Sunday. Aye

Flickr
Mine
also mine
Mae
Angel Justine
Inuitmonster
Your Funny Uncle
also here
Ms Bexy
Sunshine Pop
James I Skinner
acb
String Bean Jen

Facebook
Astrid
Jens
also here
Reb

If there's any I've missed, feel free to let me know.

Duty

Oh woe is me...

Its become my duty to write reviews of gigs, to go to these things and scribble or jab notes on my mobile phone, and punt it out onto the internet. Its not like anyone reads the damned things, just the bands themselves. My nuddy website, that gets thousands of hits a day as you might expect, but gig reviews, how many people? About twenty five hits a day.

Its almost completely hopeless.

I can't even stop doing it, I tried. I gave up months ago, it lasted about a week before I was back there, standing in the dark, glancing at 'the kids' (twenty-somethings) having fun, knives of jealous jagging from my eyes.

They stand with their friends and loved ones, chatting and laughing and thinking of the delights to come later that evening. But me, I scribble, cos if I don't, no one will.

I have become a quiet voice in a big empty room. "Readers, listen to this band, they are great", "This other band are crap", "This gig could be better if..."

I got home late last night, the train line from Highbury was closed for engineering work, I'd been to see Pocketbooks, The Zebras and Airport Girl at the Buffalo Bar, some Fortuna Pop pre-Indietracks show* . So it was late, I as tired, I wanted to get photies from the gig online, maybe stab out the review or just fuck it, not enough people read it to make it worth my time, or maybe they do, but I can't handle the ambiguity and the silence and the wait. Robbie pops up in messenger, he'd been out drinking with The Smittens, chatting to one of them who's heard of my gig reviews.

A slight fuzzy feeling spreads out in my tummy like the warmth of the first summer's day.

Then I think, oh, I've got to do this, haven't I. I don't get to lie down with my wife, or get a lift home with my friends. I just have to write the damned thing. All the time the shadow of Tasty looms over, sneering.

I don't even get to scrawl the vicious kick 'em in the balls and run away anger and frustration reviews of a year ago.

Erm.

Actually...

Its not true, I spent half of last nights gig chatting to MJ Hibbett and Camila from WeePop. It was nice.

Yesterday's favourite search to find this blog on google
'illandancient'

*see, technorati will find this post when you search for any of the band names now. I could even add links to every mention too, so google will wrap me in its warm embrace. But really, would it help me as a person? Would it help or hinder the bands? Doubtful all round.

Again

Went jogging last night, after work, round Regent's Park. The flatmate's on a fitness trip, and its funny to outpace her, so if she asks I say yeah sure, and get my shorts on.

It was the third or fourth time in the last week that I've done the jogging thing so I guess I'm back in the tracksuit. Think, think, think...

1992, 1995, 1997, 1999, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006... countless times I've done the fitness thing, going to the gym almost daily, charting my weight change and stamina change, usually during times of acute loneliness and it doesn't help, it doesn't help in the slightest. I run and I run, I push the edge of the curve, then I stagger home on my own, and wonder what the fuck is the point.

I was in the Oh Bar in Camden at the weekend, early afternoon, on my own, about three people in the place, slowly nodding off on a couch. The barmaid was chatting to the other bar guy and said something like "You don't look for love, you find it". It sounds good, but doesn't parse logically.

Anyhoo, I'm not going to find love running round fucking Regent's Park.

I can has world donimation?

Ill Theatre strip from several months back


Today's XKCD


What do I win? C'm'ere girl, we got drinkin' and DVDin' to do.

Failed attempt at being.

Its mostly guilt that brings me to Barden's Boudoir tonight. Sure I could claim to be a big fan of Arthur and Martha, but that would be doing a great disservice to Sharon from The Gresham Flyers who spent the best part of an hour working on me last weekend.

Since I've known half the people in the room for half a decade, but save the merest glimmer of recognition from the girl on the door, it counts for nothing. What I get, I have to get myself, like my damned fool plan to have one of the most popular political blogs in the UK, on a whim, because I can.

My car's parked just down the way, this is my first time in Stoke Newington, well, the first conscious time. A mob of locals came yahooing down the street as I locked my car, I swear one was packing heat. I'm only quite sure I'm not some kind of split personality serial killer, avenging some half-imagined crimes of the past, but sometimes I wake up in strange placed covered in blood that isn't my own.

Arthur and Martha on stage, halfway through AutoVia, my favourite song of their's, alas it the final song of the set. 'Arthur' seemed to be rocking out a little more than usual.

Summer festival appearances should be good.

I don't know if I was actively trying, maybe it was just going through the motions, I stood at the front, as near to the speakers as possible without people thinking 'he's standing as close to the speakers as possible', but I didn't hear any of the second band, save the blistering shards of an epic guitar solo and people clapping. Instead, I was in another place.

It was like in geography class or some MRPII meeting, slipping out of consciousness. Faces of girls I'd loved and any tenuous connection they had with the band before me. Memories of seeing them there or photos of the scene, glimpses like from a passing car, from too far away or the wrong side of the room. The stabbing shards of seperation, of missing something very important, of helplessness, of fate and damned bad luck.

Even in my slipping out of lucidity, I knew something was wrong and sought to guide my stream elsewhere to Manchester and Bolton and married life, anything away from the hell I occupied.

But it didn't quite work, the stabbing shafts of reality and it all comes back to east London cutting through. The here and now, crushing on what once was, or what I remember of it.

Even the reaffirming terrible truth that what I remember isn't the same as what actually happened.

The memories are wrong, incorrect, I know that for certain. But they are still the memories in my head, crystal clear, as though it was yesterday, last week, last year or a decade ago. The memories, soured by the truth.

Where the hell are the toilets in here?

I think I saw Das Wanderlust at Indietracks, but I can't for the life of me remember what they sounded like, and it would be unfair to judge them on tonight's performance considering it was mostly "imagine that last song sounded great" on the grounds that the singing girl had lost her voice, and the one song where DJ Waz played the 7" and the mimed along.

There were people behind me who wouldn't stop talking.

If asked what did I think of the evening, in an imaginary conversation with some vague acquaintance who happened to ask, I think in order to improve my quality of life I should have gone to the My Sad Captains single launch instead. I can barely control what goes on in my head, providing rope to hang myself was never going to be good and a better tunes would have been nicer.

Maybe that's unfair.

I think I've made many bad life decisions. I can't quite pin-point any of them, where or when.

Except climbing out of an eleventh floor window in 1997 and deciding to climb back in.


The oddest thing, after the bands I slouched out of the venue to scribble notes in my car, and as I drove away, I wanted to kill myself even more.

Running and dreaming

Another flight, driving my wee car as fast as it'll go, hundreds of miles in a funk, as is my way, but instead of hiding alone in a crowd, you'll be right there next to me now.

I had an odd and vivid, I think I still remember it. Me, Tim and Otis from school were making a movie, a DavidLynchian surreal piece, all bland corridors and people vanishing and reappearing and not being seen passing by. We finished shooting in the building, I think it was a school or university, and headed out to the car park, there were people there showing me things that hurt my head emotionally. We all piled into a car, something like a Renault Clio or a four door mini, Me, Tim and Otis and November and last year. It was cramped and unpleasant, I needed to get out. My last memory of the dream is opening the car door and rolling out to oblivion.